The problems with communication congestion, such as decrease in available bandwidths, failure and restoration of communication routes, are all well known in the art. There are many solutions that have been proposed and some have been implemented. For example, one solution calls for an external method to periodically analyze the static link weights and adjust these link weights, through provisioning, to modify the path selection process.
Also, the current routing protocols always pick the shortest—that is, least cumulative (static)—link weight path with available capacity. Communication ties are typically broken in arbitrary but fixed order. Thus, if there are two (diverse) paths, say between New York and Washington, D.C., one of these will be consistently chosen over the other and all service will ride on this path. The other or the second path will be designated as the restoration path and restoration capacity will be maintained in the network along this path. A failure in the first path would take out all the circuits from New York to Washington, D.C. However, if some of these circuits were on the second path, the failure would have impacted fewer circuits. Furthermore, this also leads to a highly imbalanced network.
This invention overcomes the problems of the prior art. The invention is a dynamic method and apparatus for adjusting link weights so that the routing of circuits will adapt as links fill up in the Switched Communication Network. This will lead to a more balanced network and fewer circuits would be affected by individual network failures, resulting in better restoration performance.